Hidden Sprites and Color Issues

[Shred Mako]

Hello everyone.  I hope I'm not asking a question that has already been answered in the forum somewhere. But, I haven't been able to find it. In fact, Ive been unable to find my problem addressed anywhere online. But, I digress. Getting right to the matter, I've been using various tile viewing/editing utilities (namely Tile molester , TilEd2002 and a few others), and I find that there are certain images that never appear in the lineup. Or, if they do, they are so horribly jumbled as to be unworkable. I've tried looking through different codecs, but with no success. My second problem is exclusive to Gameboy Color and NeoGeo Pocket (more so NeoGeo). There are certain images that contain more than four colors, but the color pallet never exceeds four. The images appear in the sprite list as undetailed shapes. I suspect that the second problem might be related to the first in the form of an additional overlay image that is not showing up. The Sprite ripping utility in Visualboy Advance Has helped to some degree with these two problems, but it only allows me to find hidden sprites/pallets for Gameboy/Advance titles. NES, SNES, Sega, etc... If anyone can offer a solution I'd greatly appreciate it.

[Shade]

I know you already mentioned trying to fix it this way, but it sounds like incorrect codecs to me. I've never ran into this problem personally, so I'm not sure of how much help I could be.

I've really only noticed this in NES games, but you could always make sure Row-interleaved doesn't need to be activated. Oh, which games have the issue you're talking about?

[Shred Mako]

The game that currently has me bashing my head against the wall is Rockman B&F for NGPC. Yellow Devil, the dragon and the top half of Wily's ship, among others, don't show up. I think they may be backgrounds I know Ive seen jumbled stages in the code, but I haven't had any luck finding a better codec in the option list. Another bummer about Wily is he has a really cool turning animation that they never put into the game, but the limited color pallet is not showing all the details. I've been trying to manually edit the sprites to fill in the details, but I wouldn't want to submit something that's just guess work.

[Deathbringer]

For NGPC games, try YY-CHR, it's the only program I've ever had any success getting sprites to look right.

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Some observations:

1. According to Mednafen, the NGP/C has 3 layers (background, foreground, and sprites). The main bosses (Yellow Devil, VAN Pookin, Mecha Dragon, Mad Grinder, and Wily Machine) are comprised of sprites on the foreground and sprite layer, where the main body is part of the foreground layer (with Wily Machine it only is on the foreground layer) and other details like the attacks are on the sprite layer. Whatever sprites you see of the bosses in the ROM (the ones that look unfinished), do not correspond to the sprites that are loaded in the VRAM.
VAN Pookin (ROM)


VAN Pookin (VRAM)


Notice how the outer shell looks between them. Either the system pulls off some impressive magic trick or it's dummy data and the actual sprites are stored in whatever format the background stuff is in (which I don't know). So that Wily turning animation might just be unfinished leftover data.

2. The palette cheating thing is done by two different processes, the overlay like you mentioned which is using the foreground layer and sprite layer (portraits and the Yellow Devil use this) or by assigning different palettes to individual tiles (VAN Pookin and Wily Machine use this, with VAN Pookin uses 7 or 8 different palettes).

[Shred Mako]

Funny, YY-CHR was the first utility I dabbled in. Before that, it was image captures and... print screen. While I found it nice that you could change the arrangement of the tiles I ran into issues with YY-CHR. I forget what they were, but I moved on to Tile Molester and found it served my purposes much better. I've since graduated to TilEd2002 and am quite pleased with what I am able to get out of it (except for the aforementioned issues). I recently tried picking CHR up again, but its been so long since I used it I found it to be unnavigable.